Poetry for the people

In celebration of National Poetry Month, poetry club members and other student writers share their favorite pieces they’ve written and explain their writing processes.

TIME CAPSULE

BY NADIA PERDUE

“A lot of the things I write are based on how I’m feeling at the moment, which may be about my feelings about growing up, or kind of a longing for the past. Lately, though, I’ve actually been writing a lot of silly, more lighthearted stuff about any random topic I can think of, really.”

ABSENCE

BY MIRA COSTELLO

“I wrote this poem in August of 2020. I had just been to a waterfall and there were a lot of families and couples there – just a lot of love and happy people. “You” is supposed to be some kind of lover, romantic or platonic or whatever. I guess I was interested in the idea of love as part of nature, or something purifying and incorruptible – something that reveals the deepest and best parts of us.”

RAIN

BY EVANTHIA FOTOPOULOS

“I wrote this poem during one of the Poetry Club meetings. The prompt was to increase the number of words in each line by one word each time you created a new line.” 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS 

BY EMILY GUERRERO

“I wrote this during a Poetry Club meeting. I assigned the members a winter-related word and they had to write a poem based off of it. My word was ‘fireplace.’

The main misconception people have about us is that we’re just hippies and are obsessed with Shakespeare, which is not true. I purposefully strayed from that. I try not mentioning them as much as possible, just because I don’t want poetry to specifically be associated with that. I don’t want that to be the only thing about poetry that people remember. I really want this to be an outlet for people.”